Entry 11: Helping Students With Disabilities

I recently completed my Teaching Genre Presentation and part of that project was to research and find articles that connected with the genre. I have written about my article in an earlier blog post and how multimodal texts can be beneficial in the classroom. I want to spend time focusing on another article from that project that my teammate Ashley found. Ashley found an article that spoke about helping students with disabilities (in particular students with Autism Spectrum Disorder). I thought that this article shined a light on a really important topic. How do we scaffold our learning to teach all students? 

The article was titled "Understanding Character Perspective: Strategies to Support Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder" by Elizabeth Finnegan and Amy Accardo. I enjoyed reading this article because it didn't just mention the challenges students with autism spectrum disorder(ASD) face but gave strategies to help. I didn't realize the challenges that those with ASD face when it comes to understanding a characters thoughts and feelings within a story. Students with ASD can have a hard time recognizing and understanding that a person's behavior and social behavior can change according to the context of the situation (Finnegan & Accardo, 2018). If students with ASD have a difficult time with those types of situations, it would make sense that they can have a challenging time comprehending character changes throughout a story. The one strategy that was given that I appreciate was graphic organizers

I sometimes feel that since graphic organizers get mentioned so often and we use them from a young age, that we can truly forget the benefits. We can find ourselves going through the motions of giving the class a organizer and not being as intentional as we can. I think the more thought and intention that is placed in creating and using graphic organizers creates an overall better environment for learning. Graphic organizers can "support the cognitive effort required to interpret and comprehend text (Finnegan & Accardo 2018, p.4). When we have a tool that can aid in providing such a supportive framework we must not let that be forgotten. The variety in which we can use organizers to place emphasis on different ideas and parts of a story is what helps make this a tool for all students. The article itself modelled different types of organizers and how they can be used to record information and ideas to tracking the changes in a character. When we break down the process of recording information from the story, we can help aid in comprehending the story. These organizers are also a great way to check for understanding and to see where students might be having trouble picking out from the story. If we can train students to understand what the organizer is asking, we are helping them to learn how to pick out certain details from the story they are reading.

The article gave a wonderful example of how by having a graphic organizer that targeted the change of emotion in a particular character, we are able to directly aid ASD students (Finnegan & Accardo 2018, p.4). While the organizer was targeted to ASD students, each and every student in the classroom benefits from this type of instruction. I feel that this goes back to a word I mentioned earlier which is intentional. The example showed a teacher that was intentional with their lesson and their instruction. There was a clear purpose to the organizer and that's part of it's success. 

The other point that this article made sure to stress was that these tools and ideas can and will help all students in their comprehension. Literacy is an ongoing process and no matter what, lesson plans and tools such as a graphic organizer aid in all levels of learning. I think about myself and my own reading and writing methods. I use graphic organizers because they truly allow me to organize my thoughts and expand my thinking and comprehension. 

This article made sure to place an emphasis on how learning should be scaffolded to help all learning. These authors felt that we must acknowledge what ASD students can go through and that by being intentional in our teaching, we can aid in comprehension.

                                                  Reference

 Finnegan, E. G., & Accardo, A. L. (2018). Understanding character perspective: Strategies to support students with autism spectrum disorder. The Reading Teacher, 72(1), 71–80.